Well, this was as inevitable as the tides rolling in. The New York Times is reporting that the US Department of Justice is investigating Apple's tactics in the digital music market. The antitrust probe is still in an early phase, and is said to focus on "the dynamics of selling music online".

I still buy CDs so I'm not a customer of any download service. The quality isn't there yet. I just don't see how Apple should be the target of this inquiry especially when they, after expenses, don't really make anything on music. It's not even tied to an iPod, iPhone, iPad, or iTunes anymore.

Well. Anytime you buy one of those, you are forced to install and use iTunes. So iTMS has a considerable advantage over other music stores : iThings' market share. This might rightly be labeled as unfair competition.

(Though I agree with you, Sony and Universal definitely deserve an investigation too. But not an antitrust one)

Well. Anytime you buy one of those, you are forced to install and use iTunes. So iTMS has a considerable advantage over other music stores : iThings' market share. This might rightly be labeled as unfair competition.

(Though I agree with you, Sony and Universal definitely deserve an investigation too. But not an antitrust one)

The individual companies can't be held accountable in an anti-trust sense, but we're seeing fines against flash memory manufacturers for collusion and price fixing. It's not really much different.

As far as iTunes goes, it's loaded and it works and I use it to transfer everything but I've yet to buy any music from the store. There are other ways to buy/sell music for other devices and anyone is welcome to do it. Apple just happens to make it easier.

What surprises me is that I haven't seen anything written about the "sheep" that unconsciously contribute to Apple's success by buying whatever Apple sell.